I am currently the CEO of Sapient Consulting, part of Publicis.Sapient and a member of Publicis Groupe’s P12 “Executive Committee”. I am responsible for the overall leadership of Sapient Consulting, which offers deep industry expertise to steward clients through the evolution of their business models in an increasingly digitally enabled world. Prior to joining Sapient in 2007, I built and managed trading groups for large merchants traders globally including Louis Dreyfus, Essent Energy, and Weyerhaeuser. Named one of the top 25 consultants in the world, I’ve also spent ten years developing trading capabilities for investment banks including UBS and CIBC.

A Preview Of Innovations That Could Upend The Energy Sector

If you want to wager that you’ll know what the energy economy will look like in a decade or two, I’ll bet you’re wrong. Here are two reasons why.

First, everyone (and I mean everyone) missed the Shale Revolution. Just as it was picking up steam, then-President George W. Bush was bemoaning our “addiction to foreign oil” in his 2006 State of the Union address. The prestigious Energy Information Agency (EIA) only used the term “shale” four times in their Annual Energy Report a year earlier and made no mention of it having a material impact on the global production mix.

Fast forward to today and the United States sits of the cusp of being the largest energy producer in the world and will likely surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia in annual oil production next year. And our best thinking suggests that the US will be completely “energy independent” in about two decades.

But therein lies the rub: That term “our best thinking”. The problem is that our best thinking on these matters isn’t actually all that good, as the Shale Revolution indicates.

Which brings me to my second reason for taking your bet. Generally in life, but specifically in these energy matters, we consistently underestimate the pace of innovation and disruption. And I have every confidence we are about to do it again.

I started thinking about this on one of my pilgrimages back to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) earlier this year to hear Daniel Yergin (author of The Prize and more recently The Quest) describe the state of play in the global energy economy. What I came away with, which is consistent over the entirety of my thirty year relationship with MIT, was a distinct feeling that just past the visible horizon really smart people were busy designing the world we’ll all live in. But if you want to know what it’ll look like, you have to ask and settle in for a long and complex answer.

First up was Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry. He spoke about the development of liquid batteries that would be capable of storing electricity at the grid level with almost perfect efficiency. This could eliminate seasonal swings in energy prices while also leveling the playing field between fossil fuels and renewables when it comes to service reliability. So now if the wind doesn’t blow really hard one day or if the sun doesn’t shine brightly the next, wind and solar plants can tap their battery reserves to compensate for the decreased generation instead of triggering a gas-fired power plant. That would mean a good chunk of the 40% of extra capacity we carry in the in the nation’s power station fleet could be made redundant, saving both money and pollution.

This goes beyond the theoretical. Sadoway is the co-founder of Ambri, a privately funded company that hopes to bring his vision of liquid batteries to the marketplace, and quickly. Indeed, the team he has assembled is currently building a prototype that could go live this year with some of its first customers being the wind producers in West Texas. Liquid batteries would enable them to reliably store energy for the first time, slashing costs. The company is backed by Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm, as well as MicrosoftMicrosoft founder, Bill Gates.

Next on deck was Alexander Slocum, a professor of mechanical engineering. Dressed in (I’m not kidding here) a Hawaiian shirt and Disneyworld tie and sporting a Duck Dynasty-like beard, he gave a talk on advancements in more traditional forms of energy. He described new drilling techniques that could reach fossil fuels as deep as ten kilometers under the Earth, massively extending the range from the current average of two kilometers, based on revolutions in drill-bit technology.

Professor Slocum then went on to elaborate an incredibly bright future for nuclear power. Mini-reactors, some as small as a truck, are being developed, each with the ability to power thousands of homes. The advantage of these smaller reactors is that they don’t have the same accident potential as their older and bigger brothers, as they can be quickly and safely shut down in an emergency.

And, he stressed, though nuclear may be clean, it still relies on a non-renewable resource – uranium. But Professor Slocum doesn’t think that will be much of a problem. While we may exhaust our current ground supply of uranium in a few decades, sea water, it turns out, is full of the stuff – a 10,000 year supply, he estimates. Professor Slocum quipped that if we haven’t figured out something better by then, he’ll really start to get worried.

As for nuclear waste, he reverted back to his ten kilometer drill bit, offering that, at those depths, burying spent fuel rods would have essentially zero negative environmental impact.

But the day wasn’t just full of academics. Bob Kleinberg from Schlumberger spoke about advancements in safety in regards to the fracking industry. He first updated us on fracking liquids – the chemical cocktails injected into the shale formations to catalyze the extraction of oil and gas – that are now safe to drink. Though he declined to actually demonstrate, he noted that the Halliburton executives do this regularly. But we got the point just the same.

Kleinberg also noted the development of new cements that can both expand and remain flexible as they cure, as opposed to shrinking and hardening as most cement does. This allows drillers to seal punctures in the water table as the pipes pass through them, preventing pollution of the aquifer.

A huge amount of time was also spent on continued progress in photovoltaic technology (that’s solar power to you and me), the costs of which have plummeted in recent years with plenty of room left in its innovation curve for further advancement. An interesting “for instance” was the idea that we will be painting solar panels in liquid form on the windows of skyscrapers soon, turning the whole edifice into one big power generator.

And finally, there were a few thoughts for fans of the clean coal movement. Both next generation nuclear and clean coal have had a rough ride recently, mostly around understanding how these projects will be financed. The Kemper clean coal facility in Mississippi is a great example of this. Far behind schedule and massively over budget, the unit none the less offers us a glimpse into a greener energy future as operators turn coal (and remember that the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal) into a gas and pump the carbon underground. Today this process is very expensive and being paid for by Mississippians who could run out of patience and dollars, but its potential is undeniable.

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